I was one of 10 people who were invited to participate in a readers panel at the Erie Times News today. There was a fairly varied array of folks as they were trying to get a broad sample. There were maybe 20 or so staff members from the Times News attending.
One of the topics that came up was the Times News web site. Some of the folks used it a bit. Some seemed to have trouble navigating it, and some seemed like they probably didn't use online stuff much. Many of us were unaware that they had multimedia stuff on the site. A tech person was there and we sort of grazed about some ideas.
I didn't think of this until after I got out of the meeting, but it would probably be a challenge for the web site of any print publication to let their audience know about multimedia. When I think of videos, I would think of YouTube or TV stations, but I don't think of print media as being somewhere that I would go for that sort of content.
There were 2 students from Villa and 2 youths, and they bounced around some good ideas about including youth in the paper. One idea was possibly having youth written article sprinkled throughout the paper, rather than just in the Fresh Ink section. I pointed out that probably they needed to do things to encourage youth to become readers while they were still young - "like smoking! Although it's a more beneficent habit." Myself, I got into the habit of reading the paper everyday when I was about 13 because I was a news carrier for the Times News. (At one point, I had 3 morning and 2 afternoon routes.)
I felt pretty good that the Times News was making the effort to connect with readers. Because of doing Erie Gay News, I also feel like I have a little bit of a perspective that they might have.
